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"I want to be recognized not just in China," she says. "I think Americans would be interested to know what a Chinese girl thinks about things." Even if the girl in question isn't wrapped in embroidered silk or delivering a kung-fu kick. --By Hannah Beech/ Beijing
THE LAWYER WHO IS OUT
When a young lawyer named Zhou Dan started writing about being gay on Chinese websites in 2001, he hoped his honesty would help combat prejudice. Homosexuality was--and still is--very much in the closet in China; Beijing had just taken it off an official list of mental disorders. Zhou's entries, signed with his own name, had an unintended consequence. Gay men from around China who had faced workplace discrimination, blackmail and even prison time started to seek his legal counsel. So Zhou, 31, decided to act on his conviction that "a good lawyer should know not only how to make money from the profession but also how to advance some mission related to social justice."
Today he is China's leading voice for gay rights. Zhou helped start a hotline for "sexual minorities" in his native Shanghai in 2003, and he teaches China's first graduate-school class on homosexuality and social science at Fudan University. Lately he has taken on the issue of AIDS, successfully lobbying the Ministry of Health not to bar HIV-positive people from government jobs. He is collecting testimony from HIV patients and legal experts to urge Shanghai's health department to change rules that he says discriminate against people with the virus.
Beijing's new willingness to confront AIDS--China's HIV caseload, now about 1 million, is swelling as much as 30% a year--has given Zhou the chance to broach taboo issues like human rights and equality under the law. If he can champion the rights of AIDS patients, he reasons, then someday he may be able to do the same for gay men--or anyone else. Zhou dreams of representing a gay man in an antidiscrimination lawsuit, but so far, no plaintiffs are willing to brave the exposure. "Law and policy always involve compromise," he says, "and sometimes being a progressive means taking things one step at a time." --By Susan Jakes/ Shanghai
GHOST WRITER
Bitter memories shape the way Li Shasha, one the nation's youngest best-selling authors, writes about the contradictions of modern China. Li's father left his village in Hunan province to toil in the southern factories that power the nation's export-led growth. When Li was 13, his father came to the school where he boarded. The watchman, apparently not believing that the shabby migrant could be a student's father, didn't let him in.
In many ways, Li embodies the Chinese dream: poor country boy works hard, becomes the only one from his school to go to college and makes it in the big city. But Li is concerned about those who didn't make it: the 100 million rural inhabitants--including his own parents--who have fled exorbitant taxes and dwindling agricultural prices and flooded the cities in search of work. Those migrants are what Li calls "ghosts in the city." "They have built the cities that China is proud of," he says, "but they are barely treated as human beings."